Sometime in the 1970's Frederick Suppe popularized the term "Received View (RV)" to denote the philosophy of science that generally prevailed during the first sixty years of the twentieth century. The RV was reductionistic in many ways. It focused on how theoretic terms reduced to observables, how meaning could be reduced to either analytic statements or to statements that are empirically verifiable and finally, to how all of science could be expected one day to be reduced to physics. The picture drawn by the RV was very tidy and optimistic. However as is so often the case in philosophy and in much of life generally, just when things get looking too good to be true, people discover it's too bad that what looks so good isn't true. This is the case with the RV.

Three philosophers in particular destroyed the monopoly of the RV. Sir Karl Popper then, Norwood Hanson and finally, Thomas Kuhn, wrote books that blunted and then eventually led to the near termination of the RV. Many philosophers, scientists and eventually even sociologists and historians of science took the RV to task and a new way of looking at science emerged. No longer was it expected that all theoretical terms could be explained in terms of observables, meaningful discourse in the sciences reduced to only two types of sentences or sciences like biology reduced to physics. One consequence of particular importance was that sciences like biology and physics were seen as being not only separable but moreover it had become fashionable to argue that neither could be reduced to the other. Physics was no longer the queen of the sciences. In addition, other sciences could not be evaluated for their authenticity by how much they resembled nomothetic-dedeuctive models of explanation so common in much of physics. Molecular biology for example was no more a science than say paleontology merely because it looked more like physics than paleontology. This is where matters had seemingly come to rest until rebels such as Alex Rosenberg successfully argued for a methodological reductionism aimed at reducing a set of sciences ( in this case the biological sciences) to standard physicalist explanations. The new reductionism as espoused by Rosenberg, refrains from superimposing ontological reduction in the wake of a very promising argument for methodological reduction.

Rosenberg may be a rebel in taking on the challenge to resurrect a form of reductionism but he is clearly far from naïve of the challenges his position faces. Rosenberg is no ordinary philosopher. He holds an endowed chair as professor of philosophy and biology at Duke University. He has worked in the philosophy of biology nearly all his life and stands as one of a handful of Olympic-class philosophers in the field. His chosen task in this book is to show how the biological sciences can be reduced to molecular biology and further to show that molecular biology depends always on at least one universal law namely, the principle of natural selection (PNS). Rosenberg in this context favorably quotes Theodore Dobzhansky's famous article title, "Nothing Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution." (p.16)

Rosenberg likens PNS to the second law of thermodynamics. Both are always present at every level of scientific explanation. This is an important point because it negates the antireductionist's challenge that downwards causation leads to explanatory gaps. The PNS operative at the molecular level is of course present causally in all biological functions. And PNS is dependent on its association with other non-derived physicalist principles for exhibiting its explanatory power. But, PNS as a law reveals much about the operation of fitness struggles determining the future of an organ, a family, a species, a phylum, a kingdom and more. Just as entropy is a fundamental law about the movement of every collection of molecules, so too it is the law which explains to the school child why a drop of blue food coloring dissipates in a glass of clear water creating a light blue color throughout the water. Thermodynamics is also a law about the transmission of heat. For example, it explains in part, along with relevant physiological principles, why warm water warms cold hands. While strictly speaking entropy is about the collective action of molecules it is a necessary causal law invoked to explain many other surface level phenomena as well. For Rosenberg PNS plays the same sort of omnipresent role in biological explanation and therein lies the case he develops for reductionism.

Whatever additional physicalist principles may be required to explain any biological function, the explanation will always entail an acknowledgement of a pervasive role of PNS. Even in descriptions of biological systems acting in the socio-psychological orchestration of group or individual altruism, PNS is present as part of the necessary explananda. Rosenberg cites the work of William Hamilton and economists Robert Axelrod and Robert Frank who followed, explaining reciprocal altruism as seeded in successful selection of cooperation as a fitness trait among many biological organisms. (This does not mean Rosenberg wisely cautions, that altruism can be reduced to genetics but only that whatever explanation is given must invoke PNS.)

Rosenberg does a magnificent job weaving in and out of potential challenges to reductionism at the hands of critics while never setting up antireductionist arguments in straw-man fashion. Moreover he avoids slipping into genetic determinism while grounding his reductionism in the PNS. Readers of Metapsychology Online Reviews are likely to be far more interested in Rosenberg's concluding three chapters wherein he argues for PNS's role in social organization and for its role in the gradients of predictability in some social interactions but it is his arguments in the preceding five chapters that establishes a solid though perhaps not impenetrable case in behalf of biological reductionism.

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